All things considered, I still plan to treat it like gospel when it proves me right.

Wikipedia’s articles are crap 99% of the time. 99.8% to be exact. Although that figure could be wrong; I got it from Wikipedia.
They have done an audit of the 1,638,011 articles on Wikipedia.org and determined that, of that total, only 1,300 articles are good enough to be considered ‘featured articles’ and 1,700 fit into their super-subjective ‘good’ category. Keeping in mind that every day the total number of articles grows, as well as the constant opportunity for any of those featured or good articles to be edited down to sub-par, this could be a big problem for a website that wants to have any sort of legitimacy as a source of reference. Now employees of the site have finally taken notice that online content, open for editing to the entire internet community (the definition of a ‘wiki’ in case you didn’t know), often ends up shoddy and biased. They must be some sort of self-loathing wiki, though, because they’ve begun a dialogue to try to solve the problem. With a Wikipedia entry. Although that particular page is listed under their essays, and most of the article is not open for edits. Near the end, the author proffers this somewhat bleak view of their accomplishments thus far:

If Wikipedia just aimed to be a social site where people with similar interests could come together and write articles about anything they liked, it would certainly be succeeding. However, its stated aim is to be an encyclopaedia, and not just that but an encyclopaedia of the highest quality. Six years of work has resulted in 3,000 articles of good or excellent quality, at which rate it will take many decades to produce the quantity of good or excellent articles found in traditional reference works. [However] almost 1.6 million articles are mediocre to poor to appalling in quality.

So it appears that Wikipedia is here for our use and abuse, but Wikipaedia, by definition, is unattainable.

Which reminds me, this all may be moot if Wikipedia doesn’t raise some money. It’s not news that most dot coms have dubious business models, they’re is no exception. They survive on donations, although in this article, they appear to be falling quite short of goals. Wikipedia has endless potential if bought out, but they profess to want to remain a nonprofit. In the same article, a spokesperson laments that Wikipedia has the same “ongoing, pressing needs for funds that…most nonprofit organizations face”. So if I’m reading their press releases correctly, Wikipedia is a nonprofit, like the Red Cross or Locks of Love, only instead of blood or hair, they supply fodder for mediocre term papers and pub quiz questions. Is this, after all this time, the elusive .com vs. .org distinction? It’s a little tricky in this case because there’s nothing tangible that they actually provide to people. Maybe if they start giving out tote bags…
I say in the case of either problem plaguing the site that they ought to roll with the punches and adjust; wiki it up, as it were.